Astronomy and Arpeggios -- Two Lost Souls Swimmin' in a Fish Bowl
by OldButYoung
Summary: Skye likes numbers because it blocks sentimentality out. But when Jeffrey and an inviting trampoline come into play, what poetry can she spit out under the influence of a thousand freckles and jade green eyes? (Yes I have a Pink Floyd reference in the title)


**A/N: Yikes I've pounded out 3 stories and a 2,000 word summer assignment in a week...Angst me...**

 **Anyway, This story is somewhat based on a trampoline conversation I had with a good friend of mine, and I thought the setting would be good for my favorite characters. This one-shot does make a reference to my last story, Of Pacing and Prisoners, so please read and Enjoy!**

"Wow"… _bounce_ … "It is hard to contemplate with a mood of existential angst when you're bouncing on a trampoline." _Bounce Bounce Bounce_ …"In fact it basically turns your mood around."

The energizer bunny known as Skye bounced around and around a boy who basked in the undulating rhythm of Skye's jumpiness. She always had to move, had to do something, had to be up and about in order to truly think. As her blood pumped fast and hard, her conscious stream of thoughts ran parallel with her fast blood flow around her brain and sorted themselves efficiently in her conceptualized compartments. Sorting, logic, steps, and a timed pace for all of it. Get faster, think harder, control more.

"Then get adolescently moody again and lay down and look at the stars with me."

"I'm good actually." Skye said, speeding up her jumps even more in order to keep with her suddenly increased heart rate. To be fair, she had been jumping nonstop for 20 minutes, and her heart could've easily kicked in from that exertion. She knows if she sits down though, her control would be lost and she'd actually start contributing to a meaningful conversation with Jeffrey, and she could never let that happen because, well, it's Jeffrey.

"Oh, Skye…fine, I'll just ask a very important question while you're jumping around like you're twelve. I'm sitting here literally making a fool of myself because I'm going to rain on your parade now."

"Ok fine I'll only stop for the sake of your end to your stupid nagging."

He looks over a her with narrowed eyes and a smile he couldn't completely suppress. It was nighttime in September, and acoustic Led Zeppelin played from Jeffrey's newly acquired portable speaker. The rattle of porcelain kitchen dishes being stacked and put away was astutely heard by the two as Iantha and Rosalind got ready to turn off the Kitchen light, leaving Skye and Jeffrey to stargaze in darkness.

"Ok, what do you want to ask?" She sat up and looked down at him expectantly, trying her hardest to not let her vulnerable mind become errant and assume either the worst or the horrifically romantic.

Jeffrey was situated in a seemingly relaxed position — hands clasped behind his head, long legs sprawled out, and the flexible surface of the trampoline bending to fit the lithe curve of his back. However, Skye had known him long enough to see past his shield of good humor to notice the minutia of anxiety. His intertwined fingers arched up so his nails subtly dug into his knuckles, his toes kept pointing and flexing, like a gymnast doing ankle strengthening exercises, and he couldn't keep his jaw still. He was truly thinking hard about what to say.

"I know you seem like you'd be the least qualified person to answer this, but I want your opinion on this more than anyone else's in the world, you hear me?" He kept his gaze straight up at the Sky, but he noticed the other Skye, the adjacent Skye, nodding her head out of the corner of his softened eyes.

"What if I don't make it as a musician, Skye? All these musicians, from Chopin to Louis Armstrong to Charlie Parker to John Lennon to even like Robert Plant had something special about them that caused their constant composition. Chopin traveled around Europe in an attempt to flee the persecuting epoch of Poland, and his songs were sad in the fact that he was homesick and nationalistic beyond belief. Louis Armstrong barely survived childhood in New Orleans, and don't even get me started on the high life and hard times of Charlie Parker. The poor saxophonist survived the competitive jam sessions of Kansas City, a 20 year heroin addiction, 2 mental hospitalizations, several arrests and periods of alcoholism before dying alone and without dignity in the apartment of a near stranger. John Lennon had a father who left him and a mother who gave him up. He struggled with terrible marriages and his own insecure mind. And even now as we're listening to "Ten Years Gone," Plant's talking about a lost love, and so passionately. Will I ever get that passion? That emotion? I missed the time period. I missed the social revolutions of the nineteenth/twentieth century — the century of 'stick it to the man' and atonal and simple music that the older generation frowned upon and the then-young kids held dear with all of their heart. I feel like I'm a passerby; I'm Dean Benedetti — I chased around the greats with all of my heart, loved them, worshiped them, did everything I could to become them, but I still came up short in my own playing because the events that happened to the Greats and the radically different times they lived in was that microscopic but crucial key that caused them to even be great in the first place. I feel like I'm an emerging Rock 'n Roll artist in 1974 — a newcomer who desperately tries to rise to fame after the protests prevailed and the war on new art was won. I'm a modern soul reaching back into the past. I don't have enough revolutionary experience in life to become a musician. I don't have that handicap that I should've pushed through as a rite of passage in order to rise to fame. I'm not an outcast, I don't have a haunting aura, I don't have an optimistic aura, I just have years of imposed etiquette classes and horror stories from a really uptight beginning piano teacher."

The pause that followed after he spilled his heart out was filled with the tangible taste of upcoming tears and heartbroken heaves of failure and helpless confusion.

At first, Skye understood why he had a disclaimer as a starter. Jane would've been a better bet at trying to pick apart Jeffrey's qualms, but Jeffrey most definitely knew that, and he directly explained that to Skye as well because he knew she would question why he had chosen her. Jeffrey had picked Skye for a reason, and prompted her to try and solve the one puzzle she had never made any progress of solving on — compassion, empathy, and understanding.

She couldn't quite comprehend why musicians did what they did or why they thought emotion dictated their actions. Her favorite musician was by far Bach, and that was only because he used math in music — he always stuck to rules, and almost never broke them. She felt an innate disconnect with music because she thought it was just the intricate interlocking of different frequencies on the Hertz. But apparently, as she's grudgingly learned from Jeffrey's incessant rants and long and passionate tangents, it's more than that.

Context. Music is context — historical unrest, the shifting of generations, anxiety, love, depression, death, circling, dancing, change, motion, celebration, defamation, and humanity. Music is not a natural scientific phenomenon. Humans had to evolve to discover the most primitive element of rhythm, and then create the instruments that could in fact sound out those specific frequencies. Then, emotion and an authority figure, namely the Pope, had to determine which frequencies were linked with a level of compatibility good enough for dancing, worshipping, praying, and loving. Once those melodic and parallel Gregorian chants filled with major thirds and perfect intervals had been created, people toyed with them because humans were nosy creatures eager to evolve.

Skye had found the parallels between music and human evolution so similar that she wondered why Darwin didn't touch upon the subject. Maybe it was too big for him — it seemed awfully big of her to even conjure the question in the first place.

However, music ran right along history, setting the stage for wars, treaties, societal unrest and compatibility, and sparked intellectual conversations and debates over which type of person is truly distinguished. Musicians have been distinguished for years, playing for royal courts and high-society balls — they were respected, loved, well-fed, and taken care of. That is, until the modern age in which Jeffrey is indeed trapped in. He has a lifetime of struggling to endure in order to make it. He'll risk shortened marriages, hours of sleep, days of starving, squalid apartments, and most of all, a balanced mind. He's already consumed with music, and as soon as he goes out into the professional world, his mind will only be one-sided and he'll forget his true roots — survival — in order to keep practicing. Jeffrey can literally waste away at the piano, trying to reach into a time he passed.

"Why?" she asked. "Why in the ever loving name of Holy Bananas would you ever think that you couldn't make it? You literally drive ME to tears with some of your French impossible"

"Impressionistic — "

"Yes, thank you, impressionistic music. And how many times have you seen me cry?"

"Well not including all the times you probably silently cried at all of my fabulous concerts…" he looked over expecting a piercing glare from her icy eyes.

He got it, much to his appeasement

"Probably…mmm….one, two, three…" he counted on his fingers in faux dramatics. "The time Batty dropped your calculator, Rosalind's graduationnnn…" he stretched out his last example as a stalling mechanism while he searched for anymore embarrassing stories of Skye crying to relay back to her. "And I think that's it, so maybe six or seven times in all?"

"You see? Your music moves people, Jeffrey. I'm an astronomer, but the only time I really have stars in my eyes is when I hear your gliding piano music seep out through your bedroom and have it travel so far, I can hear it like a protective specter when I'm watching the Sky at Arundel's cottage. In fact, it teleports people."

"Like Doctor Who style, or Harry Potter?" A scoff and a headshake from Skye's silhouette.

"Like music style. The staff or stave"

"Stave — "

"Ah, second time's a charm. The s _tave_ is like a time machine, because I next thing I know, I'm fighting beside you in the Vietnam war, or I'm drinking cocktails at a Gatsby party while you play the saloon piano ragtime style. I truly think that we're old souls in a modern time period, dear friend. We believe in family fiascos, hard work, traditions, a hearth to always come home to, love of classical music, denial of the fact that some of us are in fact getting lost in modernity…Jane…"

"Wait, you know about her?"

"Yeah she mumbles when she writes at 2 AM. I also know about your little encounter in the woods," she smirked, half teasing, and quarter…well maybe third…or half…disheartened.

His face grew frozen as blood rushed into it, cementing his stunned expression. He stumbled over words at first, trying to find the tempo of phrases he could reassure Skye with.

"Wait nonono, it wasn't like that. I think she just needed some encouragement is all…"

"And you did that by kissing her?" She scoffed with envy under the pretense of derision. "I mean if you a crush on her I get it and you'd be good for her and all, but jeez don't come on so strong."

"Whoa Skye!" He slammed his fist on the trampoline as he sat up, expecting the satisfaction gained from a loud noise, but only getting a mere squeak from the rusty springs. He took a second to compose himself, before starting with the tone of a worried, overprotective big brother.

"Jane's so lost, and she just needed someone to trust. I love her, but not like that and the feeling _is_ mutual. I will always be there with irrevocable love for her if she has a broken heart or writer's block or news of a first publishing. But I think that was my first and last kiss with her — it's time for her to find her own person, and I have full faith that she will in due time."

"Oh."

"Yeah."

"Well I'm glad that you're looking out for her when I couldn't."

His eyes softened as he looked at Skye with an encouraging tone.

"Of course you can, and you have for years. You just do it differently, and Jane needed a little change of diction and mood, that's all."

"Yeah okay I can get that."

As the conversation abruptly ended on a peaceful note, Jeffrey looked back at her with the beam of someone who has the upper hand. "So back to the conversation where you showered me with compliments and confessed to crying way more than you've previously said?"

"Oh shut up" she said as she punched him the arm and rolled her eyes with pure admiration aimed at her best friend.

The two sat in silence, well not quite silence due to Skye's constant lectures on the positions of constellations and what chemical phenomenon had to occur in order for the stars to form and glow as they did. As Skye was rolling effortlessly engrained facts off her tranquil tongue, she was whirling some options in her head. Again, moving while sorting, because she had dates to organize, concerts to book, hikes to research, plane tickets to miraculously grab at cheap prices, and some dusty history books to read up on. She was going to plan this to the second, and she was going to hide it so well that it won't even be at the forefront of her brain where Jeffrey could easily read her thoughts sometimes. If Jeffrey needs some revolutionary experiences and a first-hand look into the past of musicians, and not just gawk at it from biographies and Wikipedia articles, then Skye will go to the end of the Earth flying Jeffrey around to make sure he gets the inspiration and confidence needed to making a flying head start into the music business.

"But seriously, Jeffrey, you're really good. You're better than you think you are, so keep that in mind the next time you have difficulty dissecting a Schubert —"

"Schumann'

"Right, Schumann Concerto"

"Concertino."

"Goddammit."

A lighthearted laugh started up in Jeffrey's now relaxed chest. "You got the first letters right, so you're most definitely improving. Keep studying, hon."

"Jesus, and I thought passing Spanish was difficult. Your class is near impossible."

"My dear, nothing is impossible; however, you trying to become a musician is the most improbable thing I've ever contemplated."

"And same to you in the astrophysics department."

"Actually," started Jeffrey, lifting a finger as he intervened. "I've listened to your rehearsed lecture. I bet tomorrow night's dishes and cleaning my room that I can recite your rotation through all the constellations perfectly verbatim."

"Oh you're so on," and they shook with the strength of fellow competitors, and the intimacy of perfect companions.

And so Jeffrey started. "Right here, my fellow amateur astronomer, is Orion's belt…"

And he pointed to the all of the prominent constellations, reciting Skye's stories and fun facts, and almost matching her passion; Jeffrey loves Skye's lecture — it was the most musical speech he had ever heard. The mixed order of lighthearted tales about the star formations and the tragic woes of the exploding gas giants created a combustion of sound in Jeffrey's head. Her recitation held an overture, which claims the heroic, tragic and comedic story of Orion the hunter and why those stars aligned and how far apart they really were. It set the serene mood for the rest of her explanations — the theories and evidence rolled off her tongue as if they were the major scales Jeffrey had practiced so many times.

And Jeffrey finished with a flourish, delving superficially into black holes and anti-matter until he made a full circle back around into the plain beauty of the stars. And as soon as his story ended with a dramatic fermata, he looked over at Skye and teased "You better put on your yellow rubber gloves, goddess of domesticity, because you have some dishes to do!"

"Ugh, yeah, whatever, okay you little rat with a knack for perfect memorization of speech."

"Hmm I think it's my turn to request dinner tomorrow as well — shall we have the cheesiest pasta you can imagine, or a giant roast?"

Skye winced in terror at the thought of trying to wash those dishes. Well, she did bet on it, and she wasn't any courageous mouse; she swallowed her pride, and made a sigh of defeat, relenting to that darned Tifton boy.

"Hmm no comment? Wow I beat you poorly, didn't I?"

"You've been beating me all night with your stupid music term corrections and admitting that I, master of numbers and numbers only, can in fact cry."

Jeffrey flashed his classic enigmatic simper. "Of course you can cry, you're a human being, are you not?"

"Well actually — "

"Oh, shut up. You were raised by a loving family, and under all those metaphorical sorting files you have stored in your abnormally large head…"

Her eyes had widened at the sorting files, because she, and only she, knows about that, but only narrowed at the sound of Jeffrey's backhanded compliment.

"You're a human. Well, 90% human. So you're gonna cry. And laugh. And thrive, because you are a frustratingly ambitious person. And you'll avoid the sentimental talks unless you get coerced into them by the ever-suave me…" he gestured to himself in his blatant platitude.

"Trust me, I did not sign up for this tonight."

"Oh, you liked it," he said with sarcastic scorn. "And you like good moments and feeling good, and I only know that because your eyes squint with the same ferocity as they do when you're reading calculus textbooks. May I suggest investing in some reading glasses?" He looked to her for her response, but she had slinked back down into the supine position, arms crossed as she grumbled "It's involuntary."

"Aw c'mon, you'd look cute with some Buddy Holly readers."

"Excuse me, but I am anything but _cute."_ she spat out the last word with a curt spurn.

"Okay, I'll give you that," he said, nodding his head in acquiescence and subtly rolling his eyes.

"You're _not_ cute. You're beautiful — so very very beautiful, my wicked Skye with the analytic aspirations and oceanic eyes," he aggrandized, decrescendoing his words as he looked over at her with suppressed affection, overwhelming admiration, and a dash of disappointment.

"Well, that's better," she concurred, and the two lay back down to watch the stars.

The sky danced as if it were one of Jeffrey's heavily inked piano runs. Light, zippy, ferocious, and transfixing. It communicated with both of the teens, telling Skye to hold on her to numbers, but also slow down her action-packed self to let some compassion into her heart. And it told Jeffrey to stay ambitious — if Skye's nearly ludicrous dreams could come true, his could too. In the middle of the ethereal conversation, the two were beamed back in time — not into the 20th century, not into feudal Europe with the Gregorian chants, but to the start of music and the start of stars, and the start of their inevitable tie — a 14 billion year old teleportation, but a fiery one at that.

 **P.S. Dean Benedetti is a real person who was Charlie Parker's crazily devoted "roadie." And in a couple years, when I go traveling myself, I'll make sure to start the story of Skye and Jeffrey in their revolutionary experiences :)**


End file.
